1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of interactive paging devices. More specifically, the present invention relates to the field of enabling users to use existing address books in interactive pagers having software upgrades allowing synchronization with personal information managers.
2. Background of the Invention
Personal information managers are well-known, and used in many contexts including maintaining personal and corporate-wide contact information. Such personal information mangers include Microsoft, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Goldmine, ACT and others. Contact information is generally kept in address books. The contact information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, fax numbers, pager numbers, street addresses and other contact information. There are often multiple pieces of information for each category of information. For example, phone numbers can include one or more home phone numbers, one or more business numbers and other phone numbers. Likewise, email addresses can include a plurality of email addresses. In addition, many address books provide users with the option of storing notes related to the address book entry. The notes are a text field into which the user can enter any information the user desires related to the address book entry.
Certain prior art interactive pagers were not compatible with personal information managers. There are a number of reasons such prior art interactive pagers could be incompatible with personal information managers, including (1) the interactive pager could not execute an operating system compatible with the personal information manager and (2) the interactive pager could operate such an operating system, but had not been upgraded with such an operating system. These prior art pagers could not be data synchronized with the information that is kept or updated by the personal information manager. With the proliferation of personal information managers to keep contact information, this is a significant drawback.
Consequently, a new operating system was developed that is compatible with such personal information managers. This resulted in several compatibility problems with prior art pagers. In fact, some prior art interactive pagers could not be upgraded to execute the new operating system due to memory constraints.
Interactive pagers that could be upgraded to the new operating system were usually upgraded by xe2x80x9cflashingxe2x80x9d the old operating system with the new operating system. xe2x80x9cFlashingxe2x80x9d is essentially an in-place substitution of the new operating system for the old operating system. However, the formats between the address books in the old operating system and the new operating system were not compatible. For example, if a user had multiple entries for a field (such as phone numbers or email addresses), the conversion software lost data and did not work consistently. Consequently, the user could lose much of the contact information in the address book data. The user had to reenter the lost data manually.
A primary reason for the data loss was that during the conversion, the pager could only provide general information regarding contact information. For example, an interactive pager might be able to hold up to three entries for each field (e.g., three phone numbers). However, it would identify all three entries by a single field or tag name. For example, three phone numbers would each be identified by the field name xe2x80x9cPHONExe2x80x9d. Consequently, the conversion software did not know which field name corresponded to a particular field, for example, which value was the business phone number and which value was the home telephone number. This deficiency was true for any field that could have multiple values, including, for example, email address, phone number, pager number, fax number and others.
This posed a significant problem because the new operating system was developed to the interface with personal information managers. Personal information managers provide separate field names for like fields. For example, the field associated with the tag xe2x80x9cPHONExe2x80x9d can hold home phone numbers, business phone numbers, cell phone numbers, assistant""s phone numbers and other phone numbers. However, because conventional conversion software did not know which of the several phone numbers or email addresses corresponded to the home, business or other entity, it simply stored the first phone number or email address it found as the business phone number entry or business email entry respectively in the personal information manager it was interfacing with. The remaining information was discarded. Not only did this technique result in the loss of information, i.e., it is a xe2x80x9clossyxe2x80x9d technique, but it often resulted in wrong information being put in particular fields. For example, often the home phone number could be put in the business phone number field, while the business phone number was discarded.
For prior art interactive pagers that could not handle the new operating system, the user had to get a new pager to be able to synchronize with personal information managers. However, there was no mechanism for taking an address book from the old interactive pager and installing it on the new pager. The user could backup the address book in the interactive pager by downloading it to a computer disk. However, the user could not conveniently transfer the address book from the computer disk to an interactive pager with the new operating system. The only way to transfer the address book data was to manually reenter it into the new address book.
Manual reentry situation imposes inconvenience even in the case where the user has only a few addresses. However, most users carry hundreds of names and corresponding address information. The address information includes email addresses, pager addresses, street addresses, home, office, and other telephone numbers, fax telephone numbers, company information, and other contact information including notes for the individuals contained in the address book. Having to replace this information manually is often a thankless task that is highly prone to human error.
The inability to transfer address books easily also manifests itself in the maintenance context. For example, if an interactive pager breaks or can no longer be used for some reason it must be replaced. Generally, the old interactive pager is replaced with a new interactive pager having the new operating system. The address book from the old interactive pager must be transferred to the new interactive pager. If the old interactive pager did not have a compatible address book, the user could lose much of her contact information and have to reenter it manually. Some problems with manual reentry of the address book data have been discussed above.
Another consideration is for companies that maintain a central database of common contact information, for example, contact information regarding the other intra-company users. This kind of database is referred to as a master address book or corporate master address book. Many such corporate master address books are not compatible with personal information managers. Those that are compatible, are not compatible with interactive pagers executing the old operating system.
The present invention solves the problems in the art by using a lossless conversion tool to convert an address book information file into a user database that is compatible with a target personal information manager. A lossless conversion does not discard any contact information (other than duplicate information) in the interactive pager address book. Thus, the conversion routine of the present invention does not discard subsequent phone numbers, email addresses or other data.
The present invention allows a user to merge their individual address book and a corporate master together and load it into a personal data manager, such as Outlook, and ultimately to an interactive pager. Thus, the user then has both her personal information and any corporate-wide information available in the interactive pager.
In one embodiment of the present invention, an address book is downloaded from an interactive pager and stored in an address book information file. A conversion tool inputs the address book information file and outputs a user database in a format compatible with a target personal information manager. In addition, the conversion tool analyzes each record of contact information in the address book information file to determine the corresponding field of the target personal information manager. If there is no corresponding field in the personal information manager, the conversion tool places the record in a default field in the target personal information manager. The determination is made on the basis of a pre-determined mapping of field names from the address book information file to the target personal information manager.
The user database is merged with a corporate master database in a personal information manager contacts list database. The personal information manager contacts list database is uploaded to the user""s interactive pager. The user""s interactive pager is running an operating system compatible with the personal information manager. Consequently, the user""s contact information is synchronized with the personal information manager contacts list database.